Your customer is no longer human.

I'm seeing this across businesses and industries of every kind, and it's true for your business whether you've noticed it yet or not.

For as long as your business has existed, "the customer" has meant a person. Someone who searches, compares, reads a review, forms an opinion, and eventually decides. Every part of how you sell has been built around that person: your website copy written for a human reader, your ads targeted at a human's attention span, your sales conversation designed to persuade a human mind. That's still true but it's no longer the whole picture. A growing number of your customers are now sending an AI agent to do part of that job for them before they ever get involved.

This isn't some crazy dystopian future I'm asking you to imagine. It's live, its here, its happening right now. ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of weekly users and has been building out product discovery. Perplexity has its own shopping experience running through a PayPal partnership. Amazon's Rufus can now buy something automatically once the price hits a number the shopper set. Google's AI Mode puts product cards and price comparisons straight inside search results. None of these have "won" the category yet, and people still don't fully trust AI to complete a purchase outright but the research and shortlisting part, the part that used to be entirely human, is already happening through these tools for a meaningful and growing number of your customers.

Your customer used to make one decision: do I trust this business.

Now, for a growing slice of your audience, there's a decision being made before that one. A piece of software is quietly deciding whether you even get considered. It's reading your pricing, your reviews, your product details and what you say about yourself, then checking whether it all lines up against everyone else it's looking at. If your information is thin or inconsistent, you don't rank lower. Your customer never sees you at all.

I also see the flow-on effect in sales teams. The leads that do come through are arriving later in the decision making process and better informed than they used to be. By the time a human being contacts you, the comparing and shortlisting has already happened, some of it by a person, more of it every month by their AI agent or preferred AI platform. This means that some of the deals you're winning started before your business ever knew they existed, and so did some of the ones you're losing.

No call from your most experienced salesperson fixes not being on the shortlist in the first place, because there's nobody to follow up.

So what can you actually do about it?

You don't need a strategy overhaul to find out where you stand. If you're a founder, a business owner or part of an executive team, block out an hour this week and run this test yourself, not your agency, not your marketing manager - you.

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Mode. Ask each of them the questions your customer would ask before they ever contact you. For ChatGPT, Claude and use the temporary chat mode, for Perplexity use incognito mode, and for Google simply select AI mode. doing this ensures that the answers dont get swayed or impacted by your previous conversations or any stored memory.

  1. Im consdering buying a [your industry] product / Im considering engaging a [your industry] service. Who are the best companies I should be considering?
  2. I've been told about [your company name], tell me about them.
  3. What are the pro's and con's of [your company name]?
  4. Who are [your company name]'s perfect client?

Write down four things for each tool:

  1. Whether you show up at all
  2. Whether what it says about you is accurate and current
  3. Which competitors it recommends instead
  4. What sources it appears to be pulling from

Anything wrong, missing or out of date is your list. Whoever owns your website, your listings and your reviews should be working through it.

What good looks like to a machine

Once you've run the test, the fixes are less mysterious than they sound. You're not optimising for an algorithm. You're making your business legible.

Consistency first. Your name, your services, your claims and your pricing signals need to say the same thing everywhere they appear: your website, your Google profile, your listings, your socials, the directories you forgot you're on. A human shrugs off small contradictions. A system reads them as unreliability and moves on to a business that adds up.

Then its about completeness. These tools answer questions with what they can find. If your service pages don't say who you're for, what you do, roughly what it costs and how you're different, the agent fills the gap with a competitor who does say it. Vague positioning that a good salesperson could always talk around now costs you before the conversation exists. I'd rather publish an honest "from" price than be absent from every comparison that includes one.

Then reviews. Volume matters less than recency and responses. A business with 40 recent reviews and considered replies reads as alive and accountable. 400 reviews that stopped 2 years ago reads as a question mark. Reply to the bad ones especially, because the agents are reading those exchanges too.

Lastly go back to what each tool said it was pulling from when you ran the test. Those sources are your distribution list. If the agents lean on a directory, a comparison site or a review platform, being absent there is something you should fix. Most of this sits with whoever already owns your website, your listings and your reviews. It's not new marketing. It's the basics, finally with a reader that takes them literally.

Once you've done the above, give one person in the business ownership of it and put it on the calendar to repeat monthly, because these tools change often and what they say about you today may change in couple of months time. Right now, in most businesses, nobody owns this so doing it puts you steps ahead of your competition.